


Fortune Teller

by Margo_Kim



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: F/M, Fake Psychic Abilities, Gen, Minor Character(s), POV Minor Character, Post-Canon, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 16:54:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1234000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In New York City, December, 1983, Neil finishes up a book signing and heads to a bar for a drink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fortune Teller

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Loz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loz/gifts).



> Originally posted to Martian Holidays 2011.

The book signing is over. The crowd, those suburban mothers out for a night in the city, those last hippies still hanging on as Wall Street marches over them, those crowds of the lost and disenfranchised who just want to _believe_ —they’re gone now, back wherever home is for them. The staff of Second Story or Read All Over or whatever independent bookstore identical to every other independent bookstore in this sprawl of a nation waves politely at Neil at they stack up the chairs, roll away the tables, and wipe away the rubbish. “It’s been an honor to have you here, Dr. Martin. Great turnout tonight, wasn’t it?”

And Neil answers something about how the honor is all his, and how charming this store is, and how polite everybody was. “You hear the worst things about New Yorkers,” he jokes. It’s a good thing that this banter, the meaningless back and forth that lubricates the unpleasant necessities of life, comes so easily to him. He’s especially grateful for it tonight when his mind is halfway out the door and a decade in the past—tonight, so close to Christmas when the winter air tastes like copper and the snow makes him nostalgic even though Neil can only remember half a dozen winters in all the years that he lived in Manchester with a proper snowfall. A salesclerk walks by, her hips swaying, her hair deflated from the massive perm that Neil had hoped wouldn’t linger as a fashion choice. She catches him watching and smiles at him, and the sight is so familiar Neil can’t breathe for a moment.

Annie smiled like that before she told him a secret, mischievous and guilty at the same time, like once she’d leaned over during a dinner party and murmured that she really couldn’t stand Peter’s cooking. Or when she had curled her hand around his and brought it to her chest and whispered that she was much, much easier than she’d led people to believe. Or once she’d rolled over on top of him and said, “I’m never going to leave Manchester.”

Annie slid her leg up his as she said it, the words becoming secondary to the action. She called sex _being intimate_ and she meant that in more ways than just the physical, baring her soul for him along with the rest of her. As a psychologist, it was fascinating. As a boyfriend, it grew tiresome and he would learn to dread the first post-coital sigh, the harbinger of the forced soul-searching that would inevitably follow. But in those early months, when the feel of Annie’s leg against his was still a mystery and he would have sworn that the secrets of the world lay in the hollows between her ribs if he only looked hard enough, Annie’s words just one more form of sex, one more way she was the future Mrs. Neil Martin, and Neil would silence the world just to listen.

“And why is that?” he had asked.

“Where else would I want to go? I love it here.”

“You could love somewhere else. London. Paris. New York City.”

Annie smiled a new smile, a slow, dangerous smile as she rested her head on his chest, ear on his heart. “I’ve heard everyone’s horrid in New York.”

“Everyone’s horrid in Manchester.”

“Yes,” she’d said with that smile, “but in a familiar way.”

“We’re not as dickish as everyone says,” the manager says. “We just all know what we want and go after it. You know how city people can be. You’re from one yourself, right?”

“Manchester,” Neil says automatically before the man can guess because he will guess London, they always do, and he may not live in Manchester anymore, he may never plan on living in Manchester ever again, but he is not from bloody _London_.

The man nods knowingly. “Madchester, huh? Got a friend in that scene. I don’t think he’s listened to an American band in the last year. I was thinking of visiting next year if I can swing the cash.”

“Good God,” Neil says with mock horror, “has my city gone mainstream?”

“Only among the freaks.”

Neil asks about a bar, part of him proud that he calls them “bars” now just like he calls lorries trucks and torches flashlights because if Neil knows anything, it is how to adapt. The manager draws him a map on the back of a receipt, thanking him the entire time. “Man, you are not what I pictured. I thought you’d be one of those up your own ass, crystal and aura types. We get a lot of those in here. No offense,” the manager hastens to add as if Neil is offended or added those words would make him not if he was. “I get it, you know? I get it. Showmanship, it’s the bread and butter of the business, but Jesus H. Christ, can you guys pile on the bullshit. I mean, no offense, but how do you guys not choke on the smell of the shit you’re shoveling?” The manager claps Neil on the shoulder. His shoulder goes numb. “Seriously, man, how does a rational, sober fuck like you get in the fortune telling business?”

Neil just laughs. “Bad luck, I suppose.” He waves and the manager waves and the staff waves and it’s a very pleasant way to leave, aspersions on his career choice aside. Neil’s used to them. He wraps his scarf into his coat to cover any sliver of skin still left exposed to the bitter wind and follows the receipt. The Christmas lights light the street, white and green and red. They flash on and off, each lighting the street in their turn. White. Green. And red.

Annie wore her red dress that night she knocked on his door. That meant something, even with her protestations of professional interest and needing a second opinion. He’d seen her during the day, gone to her work to ask for his spare key because he’d wanted to hurt her and he’d wanted it to be public and he’d wanted to see her face again so that he could memorize it because sooner or later they’d run out of excuses to linger in each other’s lives. She hadn’t been wearing the dress then. But tonight she wore her red dress and her high heels and when she walked into his flat, she swung her hips slow and measured as the pendulum of a grandfather clock. “I need your help, Neil.” She looked at him over her shoulder as she said it, arched her back and stretched her legs. That meant something.

She held a stack of paper against her chest, white as snow against her red dress, and that image would be the line that divided Neil’s life into before and after.

The light turns green. Neil crosses the street with a hundred other people. New York City is good for him. In England, they called out his name in the streets, _Dr. Martin, Dr. Martin, please what’s coming tomorrow?_ Here, nobody knows him outside the freaks and the hobbyists. He’s famous in the UK. That’s why he lives in Chicago. Neil’s been stared at like he wasn’t there before, but it was only after he became famous that he realized what freedom invisibility had. There’s an unavoidable sense of invasion when strangers know your name. It creates intimacy that shouldn’t exist. That’s one of those tricks a psychiatry degree gives you.

He’d called Sam by his first name. He’d given Sam his own. “My name is Neil,” he had said, told the air behind Sam like Sam was the ghost. “I'm a hypnotherapist.” Was that it? It’s been so many years, the exact words escaping him so long ago and leaving behind only the look on Sam’s face, the manic glee of a parched man offered water. When Neil thought of the things he’d done wrong in his life, he thought of that image, he thought of the slap of Annie’s hand against his cheek, he thought of the click of her heels as she ran away and up, up, up the stairs to the roof. And Neil had done nothing but crane his head up and shout, “Sorry, bad joke, mate!”

The sting of the shame has faded. It doesn’t make him cringe anymore, doesn’t make him drop his head into his hands. That night he’d ran back to his flat and locked the door, sat on the edge of his bed and sunk his head into his shaking hands, thought of all the things he would say to Annie when she came. She never came.

The bartender smiles at him as he comes in. It’s a small, dark, intimate place, and apparently not a popular one because it’s ten o’clock on a Friday and he’s one of five people in here. Neil smiles back and orders one Guinness, please. It’s his wife’s favorite drink, and when he’s away from home he likes to drink it and remember her. Annie had hated Guinness, preferred paler drinks in smaller glasses that got her drunk quicker. Once, close to the end of the two of them, he’d brought Annie her drink and told her some little fact, something about the barley that went into whiskey or something stupid like that, and she’d said without looking at him, “You think you know everything, don’t you?”

“Fuck me if I’m wrong,” the bartender says as she passes him his drink, “but aren’t you that psychic guy?”

Neil raises his glass to her. “Cheers. Would you like your fortune told?”

Her smile is wide with a hundred teeth and it reminds him of no one he’s ever known. “I thought you didn’t do that. Isn’t that your gimmick? No personal futures, just the future of the world.” He likes her.

“Most people ask anyway.”

Most people have such hope in their eyes as they press forward, one of his books clutched in their hands— _Tomorrow Today_ , usually, or _What is and What Should Never Be_ if they are particularly fanatic—and they ask, beg, plead that he must know something about what will happen to them tomorrow, and Neil always has to say sorry, he’s sorry, but he doesn’t know anything more about them than you do. But his degree is in psychiatry and he can usually guess and that is why he’s started keeping cards with the numbers for suicide hotlines in his pockets because he knows what people look like when they want to jump. They always look like Sam who was scared of the future too, scared that it was the past.

You wouldn’t have known from Sam’s handwriting. It was neat, exact, tiny. It looked like typewriter print, each _a_ looked like every other _a_ , even in the maniacal side notes Sam made in the margins, things like _this is madness_ and _what the hell is going on_. He still had the original pages kept in a small black briefcase underneath his bed eight hundred miles away, but he didn’t need them anymore. He’d read the pages—black ink of the front and back of thirty white sheets just starting to yellow—enough that he saw the words when he closed his eyes. They come to him as they must have come to Sam, random and frantic and orderless. _Bobby Sands dies on an IRA hunger strike_ on the same page as _Darth Vader is Luke’s father_ right beneath _September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center in New York City is destroyed by terrorists._

If he looks out the bar window now, he can see the Twin Towers jutting above the skyline, solid as the city. It’s impossible, absolutely impossible, and it is going to happen.

_Margaret Thatcher elected Prime Minister._

_American President Nixon impeached for Watergate (leads to book/movie “All the President’s Men)_

_Jim Jones’s followers commit mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana._

_Rumours by Fleetwood Mac_

_Mum gets a job at St. Mary’s Hospital_

_Soviets invade Afghanistan_

All true. All written down in black ink on white paper just starting to yellow, all the things that had already happened fit on one page. He’d watched Sam’s ravings on the news, the future of the world clutched in his sweaty hands as he considered the importance of what he was holding.

“Pardon?” Neil says.

“I said I’m not most people.” The bartender nods at the drink. “On the house if you’ll sign something for me. My sister loves your books.”

“Do you?”

She smiles at him and slinks down to the other end of the bar where one of the four other patrons is banging the counter.

“I hate it when people are rude at pubs,” Annie had said god knows how many times. When Annie found an opinion she agreed with, she repeated it and would never remember that she had said it before. “I hate it when people are rude at pubs,” she said the night they met when a drunk berk knocked her on her arse at the pub near uni. “I hate it when people are rude at pubs,” she’d said on one date when Neil had been cross and snapped at the publican for fucking up their order for the hundred time in a row. “I hate it when people are rude at pubs,” she’d said that last time they’d met, almost exactly four years ago after she’d called him up out of the blue. He’d brought her roses and she’d cried on his shoulder because Sam Tyler had predicted a great many things, but he hadn’t predicted that he shouldn’t have turned the car quite so sharply.  
Between sobs, she told him, “I needed to talk to someone who understands. You were the only one I ever told about him.”

Neil was the only one privy to Sam’s secret, the only person besides Annie and someone else, Geoff or James or something like that. The day Sam Tyler arrived, Annie hadn’t known what to do. So she turned to Neil because that was what she had always done. “He’s mad,” she’d said as she fanned out the white sheets in front of him. “He’s absolutely mental.” But she said it with a touch of—what? Admiration. Respect. Amusement. Like she looked at him and saw something she’d never seen in Neil.

He’d seen Sam. Annie’d given him a ride home, same day that she offered to pick up Neil so they could talk things over at the pub, tie off the last loose ends that come with any messy breakup with too many shattered expectations. This was supposed to be their time to fix things. Then she invited Sam to come along.

When he grabs his drink, his wedding ring clinks against the glass. “Mrs. Annie Martin,” she’d joked with him over breakfast, the only one Neil had ever made her. “I like the way it sounds.”

When she bent over in her red dress to fan out the sheets of paper, Neil stopped breathing. “DI Tyler isn’t like the other ones, Neil.” Annie smoothed out her dress and her hand lingered against her heart and she smiled a smile that was so familiar it fucking gutted him. “I want to make sure he’s okay.”

“He’s a fucking lunatic,” Neil had spat as she walked to the door. Annie had shrugged. She hadn’t looked at him because after Sam, she never looked back.

That was why Neil went into the canteen that day, sat down at that table, and said it. “Sam, if you can hear me, that means you can wake up.” It was a bad joke, one he’d never apologized for. He’d told Annie instead, waited for her to laugh with him or at least to look at him. She’d hit him instead once, twice, three times until Neil jumped back holding his cheek. “It was a fucking joke, Annie. He’ll be fine.”

She had quivered with rage. “You think you know everything.” And she’d turned and ran.  
And in December, 1980, she had grabbed his hands across the pub table and said, “He wasn’t crazy, Neil. Sam was right.” She stared at Neil and never once saw him that night. He was someone who had known Sam in a way that no one else ever had and that was why he still mattered to her. But then again it had been seven years since they’d dated and Annie still wore the red dress when she came to see him. That had to mean something.

“I know,” Neil said. “Sam was right about everything.” And Annie didn’t really care whether he said it or not. She’d had her cry and now she was done. Neil had gone home alone that night, laid on his bed, and stared at his ceiling until his past didn’t feel like it was gnawing at his heels. Then he reached under the bed, pulled out that black briefcase, spread the pages across the floor, and started typing. He finished _What is and What Should Never Be_ in a week. The only hard part was making the predictions vague enough to be believed. It sold 100,000 copies in its first year in print, amazing for a book with no marketing, no editorial push. The Guardian did a profile on him, called him the “Prophet of Manchester” with a heavy dose of sarcasm. Annie called him after that, left a four minute message on his ansaphone. Neil erased it without listening to it.

 

“Here, Nostradamus.” The bartender puts a pen and a napkin in front of her. “Just write something like, ‘To Alison, the future is fuckin’ great’ or whatever. Some bullshit like that.”

Neil shakes himself and takes the pen. “I take it you aren’t a believer.”

"I’m not twelve, am I?”

 _To Alison_ , he writes, _don’t listen to people like me. The future is whatever you want it to be._ “Here,” he says.

She laughs when she reads it which make Neil laugh which makes her laugh again. “You’re alright,” she says. “You’re not bad.”

“High praise.” He downs the rest of his Guinness in one swallow. She starts to get him another and he waves her off. “I’m done, love. I think that’s it for me.”

“Just one?”

“I shouldn’t have anymore.” He stands and leans forward conspiratorially. “I’m a miserable bastard when I’m drunk.”

“Hey, Alison!” a man at a table shouts. “Where the fuck is my next round?”

“Where the fuck is your money, Jack?” she shouts back. Alison looks back at Neil, still fingering his autographed napkin and chewing the edge of her lip. “Well, this is embarrassing.” She’s young, she’s so young, Neil can see that now, but she meets his gaze head on and her lips quirk up just so as he looks back. Yes, he likes her. He likes her a lot.

“I’ve had worse,” he says.

“Alright then, so you know my shameful secret.” She folds up the napkin like it’s something precious and tucks it into her back pocket. “Don’t suppose I can convince you to tell me yours. If you think I’m gonna spill, don’t worry. I’m a barkeep. We’re very discreet.”

“You want to know where I get my predictions from?”

“Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’s some smoke and mirrors bullshit,” she says. “But you called John Paul getting shot, I mean, you fucking got that. And you said that _Rocky Horror_ would still be popular and that’s totally true and obscure as fuck. If you’re getting visions from God or whatever, why the fuck would he tell you about _Rocky Horror_?”

“The truth is I did something petty that could have become something horrible,” Neil says. “I did nothing but know the right person and hold on to the right things and now, if I wanted to, I would never have to work another day in my life. I don’t deserve it. It’s not very fair. And truthfully, nine days out of ten, I don’t care at all.” Alison blinks at him and then she laughs because really what can you say to that? Neal puts a fiver on the bar. “Keep that. It’s almost 1984.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she shouts after him as he walks to the door.

“Investments.” He stops in the open doorway and says over his shoulder, “Two words: Apple Computers.”

Out on the street, no one knows him. The Christmas lights are still blinking white, green, and red as the people rumble along underneath them. It’s 1983 for another ten days and an ocean away Sam Tyler is fourteen and dead, both at once. Annie Tyler is a widow and Mrs. Neal Martin is a farm girl from Illinois who traveled to Manchester one summer on a whim. And Neil will spend his Christmas weekend wishing he was home while he ducks into alleyways to avoid anyone who might know him. There doesn’t seem to be a straight line between what we expect and what we get, what we want and what is good for us. There doesn’t even seem to be a straight line between yesterday and today. Things happened and people died and Neil would die a millionaire if he kept on this path and none of that was what he expected and none of it’s what he would have said he wanted, but he could live with this, he really could. And in five days, Ruth Tyler would get an anonymous check in the mail for 20,000 pounds because right there in Sam’s notes was _1983—Mum can’t afford Christmas presents_. Just because it’s written down doesn’t mean it has to happen. Does it? (God, please, tell him, _does it_?)

The wind finds all the holes in Neil’s jacket, but it’s a short walk to the hotel as the snow starts to fall again, thick and white just the way that it never did back in Manchester. Neil takes one step forward and the tide of New York City sweeps him up in her anonymous embrace and carries him, one of seven million, where he needs to go which is anywhere besides where he is.


End file.
